Tracker

Avantages

The ability to create parent and child cases with ease. Updating each case is simple also.

Inconvénients

The outlook integration is cumbersome, but the integrated email is great.

Avantages

Customer (web) Self Service Center. incident submission automatically searches knowledge base and suggests PERTENANT articles. Competing products do this but we have not seen any do it well.

Knowledgebase that inserts itself into the process but doesnt get in the way. Building the KB is very easy to do in the course of resolving incidents.

Very flexible tracking of contacts, contracts and time. We have resellers and end users. Tracker handles incidents submitted by either party and keeps everyone up to date.

Theyll host Tracker or let you put it on your own server. They have desktop, browser and smartphone versions.

We have not found any aspect of the program that we could not tweak. Users can modify reports, database (MS SQL), most screens in the application and the customer support center.

The system handles emails quite well. screen shots, file attachments and hyperlinks, etc.

Inconvénients

We spent more time than we should have before going live. This really isnt PhaseWares fault. Its only listed as a CON because I wish their manual had an introduction that said Dive in; you can tweak it later.

In retrospect we also should have stuck more to their training (included with purchase) rather than digging in on our own but being in the SW biz we thought we could learn their stuff faster than they could learn ours. We were wrong. They have an incredible knack for understanding the many and varied ways people want to do business.

Avantages

I love the visibility of my team having the ability to see and work out of one queue. The ability to have access to multiple queues is also a feature I love. There are times when I need to access queues for other departments and I'm able to do so with ease. I also love the ability to be able to track a file by different parameters within the system.

Inconvénients

I thought as modern technology continued to evolve the system update and layout would look more updated. I thought the visibility and layout would look more up to date.

Avantages

Easy to use for new hires to come up to speed quickly.

Inconvénients

Some of the features from Demand were not ported over to Beyond. the ability to see past viewed tickets. The screen roles as you scroll up and down the journal entries. the search screen doe snot always clear out and some times you need to clear individual fields manually.

Avantages

The PhaseWare team was responsive to every special need and request that we made, including some significant customizations to the program. They even set up a custom demo installation on their own servers, and left it active for testing and training during our entire implementation period. Every member of their team was intelligent, personable, and provided great customer service.

PhaseWare handles Tracker support using its own software - something we were surprised to find that some competitors don't do-- and their Self Service Center is highly usable with active community forums and great downloadable documentation. They include a Suggestions forum, and the newest version of Tracker includes many of those suggestions.

The software is scalable and reliable, and provides us flexibility to make changes that fit our workflow and reporting needs.

Inconvénients

The Self Service Center is a bit blocky looking "out of the box" and is missing some features that are offered by many competitors (like "email this article" and "print" links, and rich text formatting in the knowledgebase). Creating "canned" responses and template incidents requires administrator level access, and the method of adding the canned snippets to support incidents in progress is cumbersome. No ability to manually sort field values or lists of downloads, FAQs, etc-- nearly all display alphabetically. There are limited tools available for ad hoc reporting/querying - the report designer requires programming knowledge.

Avantages

The ability to track support provided. The types of reports that can be produced and customized to track the support.

Inconvénients

I feel that it lacks the ability to upload multiple attachments to incidents at once. You have to create a new journal entry for each attachments that you attempt to upload to an incident. When forwarding or replying to a response - it does not track it in the system like an email message so it's hard to forward the message again since it doesn't display the header of when the previous message was sent using Outlook plug-in.

Avantages

After setup, it was easy to install (web GUI), train, and use. Users were adding work orders and the PhaseWare tracker alerts are keeping me up to date and I was able to respond quickly, and assign the work order to a technician. Using the Journal entries was great because it kept the customer up to date on thier work order and allowed efficent reporting for inquiries about a particular work order. Setup was decent and the administrative documentation met most of our needs to fulfill our requirements. Any other questions were answered quickly and efficiently by the PhaseWare support personnel. The report templates are easy to use after going through them to see which template worked the best. After further investigation, I was able to create reports based on my favorite searches which is a breeze to define. The web portal is great and easy to use. I really like to email setup as well to let me know what's going on and reminding me when a work order is due or to follow up.

Inconvénients

This was not really a con, but the first intial training session was a little confusing and jumped around a bit. I think that was in part to our company asking questions while the trainer was walking us through the application. I would reccommend a beginning to end approach for the training. The trainer was very gracious and patient with our questions.

Avantages

The ability to create multiple departments, SLAs, and agents is a big bonus in this tracker program. It allows you to create reports based on users, departments, and issues. When you're falling behind in SLA, you can run the report and figure out the trend as to what/how/why and train or hire accordingly. I love being able to go back and explain to a user what happened and how I can fix it based on the information captured in the incident.

Inconvénients

The ability to customize additional fields can be improved. The amount of time it takes to delete unrelated information such as images from an email that isn't necessary, etc. Also, unable to attach multiple images and screen shots in one go makes this a little more time consuming.

Avantages

We have a hosted environment and have not had any down time. Not having to install, update or maintain environments has saved us a considerable amount of time. Support is great they answer questions very quickly. Very few bugs encountered. So far only some minor bugs which were resolved quickly. Easy to use with 95+% of the functionality we needed.

Inconvénients

Reports don't provide full access to all user defined or system fields without having to make some customizations. The web screens I found difficult to customize - not intuitive. A lot of screens commit instantly so you can sometimes overwrite things inadvertantly. I think the administrative screens should allow you save changes or revert back, not necessary for the incident screens.

Avantages

A powerful client that does what it claims and more. The software will allow the logging of different types of support tickets, follow up with those tickets, generates reports, and much more. PhaseWare support support is friendly and they also include a Knowledge Base/FAQ area based on using the same software.

Inconvénients

- Be sure you know what you want from your software up front. Once the implementation is complete, you will be charged an hourly rate for any changes that may need to be made in the future.

- There is a learning curve once you first use it, after the inital use you wonder how your organization did without it.

Avantages

This software was purchased to replace an exisiting Help Desk software product. Phase Ware Tracker was purchased with certain qualities in mind.

Foremost was a product that serve as a communication tool between end users and technicians. Tracker handles the task easily with automatically generated emails between users and technicians initiated with journal entries.

Second, we needed a product that would automate a series of tasks initiated by a single user. Tracker's workflow process help us in this regard.

Customer support has been excellent. Phase Ware uses its own product for their own customer support. The customer support representatives have been very helpful and timely in their responses. I have never had a problem getting an issue resolved.

Inconvénients

The user manual is very terse and it reads more like a developer manual. There is not a lot of explanation about how to perform certain key functions.

Rather, the manual explains functions of the software but not how those function integrate to the whole. Perhaps a rewrite of the user manual with on emphasis on how to do certain common tasks.

Avantages

They have deep features that we could not find elsewhere, even in products costing 2-3 times as much. For example, we sell software, and Tracker gives us the ability to relate solution providers (resellers of our software) to our end users, the retailers. We can easily respond to either party and keep the other party in the loop. Either party can log into the self-service center to see their stuff.

Inconvénients

No complaints. The product does what we need it to do, and support is excellent.

Avantages

The ability to see a list of unfinished products. The ability to track the progress of projects and determine what step to do next. Also, the ability to retrieve data and documents about a project a year later.

Avantages

My organizations have used Tracker to operate a 24 hour international help desk and another for client management and services. The system has always been solid and rich with functionality. I am forever loyal to this brand as it continues to evolve with the times and always offers my companies the latest in technology and client management. The Directors have a proven record, excel in customer satisfaction, and lead their industry in anticipating new enhancements and upcoming trends.

Inconvénients

In the 10 years that I have worked with Phaseware, I have no complaints. I frequently recommend their products and services to my associates.

Avantages

It's integrated with email and configurable

Inconvénients

email integration includes signature icons as attachments which adds to the # of journals

Avantages

The tracking of calls works well and we love being able to drag in emails, faxes and recorded phone conversations into the calls. We like being able to customize screens and add fields. This is our first call management application and it has helped us a great deal.

Inconvénients

We evidently have very unique needs in our software support tracking. The way the system tracks support agreements is not how we track it so this feature is of no help. Without this, the system is unable to help us with billing. We have created a billing work around, although the process takes time. System auto saves so the single drop of a pen on a keyboard or a click of a mouse with a lost cursor can erase an entire conversation. We have other areas we have requested changes or enhancements on but have only seen one of those come to production and that change is not reflected in reports.

Avantages

detailed

Inconvénients

complex set up

Avantages

Product is a customer oriented (versus product oriented) support help desk. If you track issues by customer (versus product) it will meet your needs. It is easy to use, the support team is great, and simple modifications to layout are easy to do and intuitive

Inconvénients

The documentation on how to install the system was not initially made available to us. The company verbally walked us through the installation, but we requested documents to have on hand if issues arose in the future. These were later provided in email format.
The product is geared towards tracking issues by customer/company name. If you track by product part number (like PC company's use Service Tags) this product will not work well for you.

Avantages

Being able to jump from screen to screen is easy to do.

Inconvénients

No clear cut area to setup customer connection information so where we put this inforamtion we have to drill into the client to see it each and every time

Avantages

* MS SQL database backend.
* Tracker is an extremely stable product.
* Excellent user manuals.
* Excellent technical support.
* Quick response to and turn-around of requested customization work.
* Easily configured.
* Stand-alone Administration module.
* Screen designer to configure GUI screens.
* Event Engine allows configuration of dynamic business processes and workflows.
* Very reasonably priced.
* It just plain meets our needs and works great.

Inconvénients

* Event Engine would benefit from a icon drag/drop workflow generator.
* Custom report builder requires additional training, however, training is very reasonably priced.

Avantages

alerts, easy to use and understand.

Inconvénients

May simply need more training or review more to learn all of the many features, functions.

Avantages

It works quickly and efficiently.

Inconvénients

Nothing.

Avantages

Tracker is amazingly customizable and took roughly an hour to design things so they work best for Stratasys. It's also very quick and lightweight on the systems it's installed on. Our SLA success has gone up nearly 10% since we started using tracker and I'm sure the program is responsible for at least half of that gain, if not more.

Inconvénients

Report modification/customization is a bit tough, but that's not unique to Tracker. Tracker does a better job at this than most but it's still the one area that that frustrates the most. That being said, they are very quick and willing to help out where they can with SQL code (which is usually what it ends up being) via their forums or email which is far and above what most companies do.

Avantages

They have deep features that we could not find elsewhere, even in products costing 2-3 times as much. For example, we sell software, and Tracker gives us the ability to relate solution providers (resellers of our software) to our end users, the retailers. We can easily respond to either party and keep the other party in the loop. Either party can log into the self-service center to see their stuff.

Inconvénients

It was hard to find! We are software developers ourselves, so we knew what we wanted. We performed a very exhaustive search that dismissed many other products almost immediately, yet that search took hundreds of hours.

Avantages

-Great Product for Price
-Great Customer Support
-Extensive Online Forum Community
-Very Customizable
-Event Engine/Email Checker for automation
-Contact Creation on known Customer's Domain
-Automatic Password Recovery
-Securities and SLA features
-TOD: Tracker On Demand for on the go
-Chat capabilities
-Ease of Use and Ease of Training

Inconvénients

-Email Checker needs the capability to prescreen incoming emails
-Event Engine cost per event can get expensive
-Unable to assign group to an incident